Australia Network - English Bites - Series 7 - Episode 19: Forest Protesting

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Episode 19: Forest Protesting

Transcript

We'll look at the words protest and protest, and the phrasal verb open up.

Well we're standing adjacent to the Tasmanian World Heritage area. What we have here is the tall, ancient trees such as these and old growth rainforests surrounding us. This forest looks to be logged any day now.

I'm Jenny Webber. I'm from the Huon Valley Environment Centre. I'm a forest campaigner who works for southern environment centre in Tasmania and we campaign for the southern forests.

So Huon Valley Environment Centre and a number of community activists have established a protest camp. We are very concerned about the logging of this forest and on top of this tall tree we have a tree sit where people are living and bearing witness and saying "please, halt this logging immediately" and we want a moratorium on all ancient forest that is bordering the world heritage area and particularly this one.

They've established a protest camp. There are two ways of pronouncing this word, depending on whether it is a noun or a verb. Protest camp is a compound noun and it's pronounced 'protest' a protest camp. But the verb is usually pronounced protest- they protest against the logging, or the cutting down of the forests.

What other term is there for cutting down trees?

This has been an area of forest that we've been quite concerned about for a number of years now. Logging activities have already proceeded just down the valley a little bit and this second section here of the coupe is going to be logged any day and not only will we see all these amazing old growth trees felled and destroyed and wood chipped and then the remnants burnt but the logging here will open up the boundary of the World Heritage area to other threats.

The trees will be felled. This means they will be knocked over or cut down. They will also be wood chipped - this means they will be turned into small pieces - chips - for making paper.

What did he say the logging will do to the World Heritage area?

The logging here will open up the boundary of the world heritage area to other threats.

It will 'open up' the boundary of the world heritage area to other threats. Here open up means to allow entry or make easier to get to.

And what threats will the World Heritage area be opened up to?

Loss of wilderness, potential escape of wildfires, spread of diseases and that sort of thing.

What does he think they can do about it?

So those are the reasons that we're here today and we've got a camp set up here and we have a tree sit in the forest basically to let the world know what's going on and try and slow things down at least for as long as we can. Growing up in Tasmania all your life I personally find that I don't think I could sit by and ignore and watch while this is happening so I feel personally compelled as a citizen and as a concerned member of the community to do all I can obviously peacefully, non - violently to both try and slow down the destruction here and let the word know what's happening.

He thinks they can slow down the destruction. To slow down means to do things more slowly, like this. The opposite is speed up, which means to do things more quickly.

So we've seen that open up means allow entry, that you protest about something and call it a protest, and to fell a tree is to cut it down.

We'll finish with another protestor who uses two forms of the verb to lose - the future tense will lose and the past participle lost:

One of the reasons why we work to protect these places is because there's so much being lost and the people that are suffering the most or people who will lose the most will be the next generations.

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